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Top day spa best couples massage packages

Top day spa best couples massage packages

Top day spa best couples massage packages

An Effective Therapy for Depression

We know that exercise helps alleviate depression, especially aerobic movement. There is plenty of evidence that meditation helps lift one out of the doldrums as well. A new study published in Nature and conducted at my alma mater, Rutgers University, combined these formats, with positive results.

The researchers focused on neurogenesis, the growth of neurons from neural stem cells. A healthy brain will grow thousands every day, predominantly in the hippocampus, a region that aids in memory and emotional regulation. Stress is a known cause of restricted neurogenesis, which can then lead to depression. This study is based on the idea that depression is caused by a reduced number of neurons being produced in the brain.

Aerobic exercise like running has been shown to double the amount of new neurons created in active versus sedentary animals. The researchers decided to study how MAP (mental and physical) training could potentially help alleviate depression. They are working from the well-trod literature that began with Richard J. Davidson’s work in brain mapping the neural correlates of meditation.

The study included fifty-two participants coming into the laboratory twice weekly for eight weeks. Each session included a half-hour of focused-attention meditation and a half-hour of moderate-intensity aerobic exercise. Individuals with major depressive disorder reported noticeably less depression during follow-up visits. As the researchers write,

Although previous research has supported the individual beneficial effects of aerobic exercise and meditation for depression, these findings indicate that a combination of the two may be particularly effective in increasing cognitive control processes and decreasing ruminative thought patterns.

Ruminative thinking is an important marker of depression; major signs include the inability to concentrate or make decisions. Feeling purposeless and unfocused cause people to question their self-worth; feeling unmotivated is a challenging hole to climb out of.

When Davidson scanned the brain of French writer and Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard in 2008, he had Ricard meditate in four different styles: compassion, focused attention, open-presence, and devotion. While we usually treat meditation as one format, there are a number of ways to focus, depending on tradition and goals.

The classical network of attention areas, including the prefrontal and parietal cortices, were activated.

Where we give our attention dictates how we perceive reality. More than anything this study shows how combining effective techniques might provide a more powerful antidote than one practice alone.

After only eight weeks, participants reported a 40 percent decrease in depressive symptoms. For only two hours a week, sixteen hours total, that’s an intervention worth looking into.

Your New Anti-Depression Medication: LSD

Shortly following its synthesis in 1938, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) fascinated mystic explorers of consciousness while wreaking havoc on those that didn’t realize they might be going in over their head. Briefly marketed in therapeutic settings in 1947 (and used by the CIA in mind control experiments shortly thereafter), LSD was deemed illegal in the United States in 1968.

As the cycles of history go, we have returned to therapeutic applications. While still illegal in the US, LSD is showing promise in treating patients suffering from depression. This stu

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dy is particularly interesting in that it investigates the role of the human brain’s default-mode network in mental time travel. As it turns out, those of us with an active DMN are more likely to reflect on the past and hence wax romantic about what is not present, a reliable marker of depressed states.

Psychedelics appear to deactivate the DMN, forcing users to stay in the present moment. Ironically, the DMN has been championed in Flow states, in which the experiencer is also in the throes of “ego dissolution,” the term LSD researchers employ regarding the deactivation of the DMN. Flow states apparently shut down the brain’s central executive mode (the other major mode) in its own form of ego destruction.

There’s even a style of introspection associated with the DMN: nondirective meditation. Also known as ‘mind wandering,’ this study showed a positive link between activation of the DMN with emotional processing and memory retrieval.

This form of meditation is not simply daydreaming, though that too is pertinent: we have an average of two thousand daydreams every day, each lasting an average of fourteen seconds. Nondirective meditation takes its cue from mindfulness, noticing thoughts arise while abstaining from creating a narrative. Our brain produces thoughts, but the conscious ‘I’ has a role in what stories it tells from those mental images.

Which puts the activation—or, in the case of LSD, deactivation—of the DMN into the spotlight. The human brain is complex and interactive, a symphony not a solo. What appears to be true regardless of how you get there is the necessity of ego dissolution when dealing with emotions. Perhaps better put, not taking things so seriously.

Certainly a monumental task, this quieting of that pesky inner voice always speaking forward and backward with so little regard for the moment. In 1970, when LSD had become illegal, the philosopher Alan Watts put forward his own thoughts on the topic in his essay, ‘Psychedelics and Religious Experience.’

Watts considered the incessant individualistic focus of American culture to be one of the failures of imagination that LSD prominently points out. Societies mimic brains in breadth of connections—think of neurons as people interacting and communicating. If you consider yourself an island separate from the populace, depression is guaranteed; if everything that happens is happening to you, life becomes a conspiracy aimed at your demise.

Watts continues along this line:

All forms of life and being are simply variations on a single theme: we are all in fact one being doing the same thing in as many different ways as possible.

While Watts enjoyed his experiences with psychedelics, especially LSD and cannabis, he recognized their limitations. They can introduce you to important ideas that you might not have considered, but you have to stay there on your own, which is essentially the same argument being made about LSD as a depression reliever. In fact, microdosing has become a popular therapeutic technique with strong anecdotal results.

Watts points out another issue that today is slowly dissolving in America: the religious fear of union. In Buddhist and Hindu systems, Watts’s specialty, man has every opportunity to become one with the godhead. In Western faiths this is blasphemous. A loss of ego, one of the most discussed consequences of LSD, connects you with the ebbs and flow of existence. Hold too tightly the reigns, your hands are burned.

Surrender is key. Psilocybin is proving especially effective in treating patients at the end of their lives, particularly with the existential quandary of transience. We need medicine in the prime of life as well. Research on LSD continues to be promising. With all the talk of ending the ‘drug wars’ in political and prison system circles, America needs to rethink its relationship to psychedelics as well.